Challenge Statements 

Problem Statement 1: Hardware Reverse Engineering 

In this challenge, participants are given Verilog modules whose true identities, coding structure, and Trojan status have been obscured. Some designs are clean; others are infected with an in-house LLM-assisted Trojan insertion framework. 

Team Composition: Each team must comprise 3 members. Additionally, they can have one faculty member as a mentor (optional).

The participants' goal is to reverse-engineer, classify and analyze these HDL files. The bootcamp is split into two stages:

Qualification Stage: 

In the qualification stage, the IIT Kanpur team will share some obscured RTL codes with the registered participants. The objective of the participant will be to do the following:

1. Design Name/Function – What hardware block is this? (AES, UART, FIFO, multiplier, etc.)

2. HDL Coding Style/Structure – Behavioral, RTL, structural, FSM-centric, or mixed.

3. Trojan Status – Whether the design is HT-free or HT-infested.

The Qualification Stage will be conducted online. The dataset and instructions for this challenge can be found in this link . The participants will have to submit a 2-page report (IEEE double column) on the attack as well as the source code. The submission link is posted.

Final Stage: 

The Qualification stage participated Teams are will be invited to IIT Kanpur to participate in a 2-days boot camp on Hardware Security. The participants will be provided with more advanced obfuscated RTL architectures to test the capabilities of their detection tool.

Problem Statement 2: Side Channel Analysis of Quantum Secure ML-KEM (CRYSTALS- Kyber) 

Lattice-based cryptosystems such as CRYSTALS-Kyber form the backbone of post-quantum security standards. However, when implemented on hardware platforms such as FPGAs, these systems are vulnerable to side-channel analysis, which exploits the information leakage through power consumption and electromagnetic radiation.

Team Composition: Each team must compromise of 3 members. Additionally, they can have one faculty member as a mentor (optional).

In this challenge, participants’ objective will be to retrieve the secret key of CRYSTALS-Kyber through side-channel leakage. The bootcamp is conducted in two stages:

Qualification Stage:  

In the qualification stage, the participants will be provided with software-simulated power traces of the CRYSTALS-Kyber decapsulation unit. 

The dataset and instructions for this challenge can be found in this link .The objective will be to recover the secret key used in the CRYSTALS-Kyber decapsulation. The participants will be given a simulated trace dataset of the pointwise multiplication result of secret key S1 with another random polynomial in the NTT domain. The problem statement would be recovering the secret key S1 given the input ciphertext polynomial r and simulated traces. This stage will be conducted online. The participants will have to submit a 2-page report (IEEE double column) on the attack as well as the source code. The submission link is posted.

Final Stage:

The Qualification stage participated Teams will be invited to IIT Kanpur to participate in a 2-day boot camp on Hardware Security. At IIT Kanpur, teams will be provided with real power traces captured from an FPGA running CRYSTALS-Kyber to test the capabilities of their developed attack. 

Teams that require the fewest number of side-channel traces for successful retrieval of the key will emerge as the winners.

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